How To Make the Good Exercise Habits Last

DO YOU STRIVE WITH MOTIVATION? It’s about having a good plan, and about being persistent

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

New Year is the period when many people set new goals. The new goals are often about exercise and health. Many start well with new exercise habits in January but strive to continue when the first month of the year approaches the end.

Many have trained earlier, but for various reasons, they have stopped training. At New Year’s Eve, you are happy to try to get started with your exercise habits again. It often turns out that it is not that easy. For many others, the training has never become a habit. Either they have never begun, or they have not managed to make the training a habit.

What is needed to establish good exercise habits? How long does it take, and what are really good exercise habits?

You establish a good training habit when you commit long-term to physical activity and exercise. In other words, you maintain a training regime for an extended period after you get started.

Another way of saying this is that you satisfy the Directorate of Health’s recommendations for physical activity on a weekly basis.

To create sustainable training habits, there are two things that are necessary:

• You have to start exercising.

• You have to maintain the training.

The latter can often be the biggest challenge. Examinations from abroad show that about half of those who start training fall out again in the first 6 to 12 months. This indicates that it takes from a half to one year before one has established a training habit.

Three tips for creating good exercise habits

1. Be aware that the habit shall become a long-term commitment — often lifelong.

2. Go through and develop different coping strategies for risk situations. — What if there is a busy period at work? — What if something happens to the life situation? What strategies should I have to maintain my training habits?

3. When these strategies do not work, a coping strategy is needed, ie a strategy that allows you to master the recurrences so that you get started again quite quickly.

Key to good exercise habits: to hold back, not to start too hard. It is a common experience that one gets motivated for training when results show up. How exercise works on the body and mind is important!

You can have a specific goal, such as to go for a quick trip for 30 minutes minimum three times a week, to participate in a race, a half marathon, a hike, etc. For example, to me, it is very motivating to have long walks in the countryside and to have mountain peaks as a hiking destination.

The most important thing: To set goals, to make agreements with oneself. And to keep those deals.

Five Tips for Establishing Good Exercise Habits

1. Schedule: Decide in advance. Pack the training bag the night before and set up the time for the training in the calendar. There is rarely any sudden motivation that makes you go off for training.

2. Find a training partner and/or a personal trainer. Join group training hours, eg. spinning or yoga, or something else. It will make meeting time more binding. At many gyms, there are a large number of group lessons from 30 minutes to one hour.

3. Do what you like — not what you think is necessary. Go for a walk if you like it or go spinning. If you start on a training form that you do not like, there is a great risk of you ending up. Rather, try to explore new forms of exercise once you’ve got someone you like in place.

4. Choose training form out of your goals. Need to get better fitness, start cycling (spinning), indoor running, or the like. Need better agility, rigidity and a softer body, try yoga or pilates. Need more musicians, start with weights and instruments for muscle training. And again, find out the types of exercise that you like and can hold on for long enough to get the effect out of your workout. — Are you old? Try Senior Pulse! Or the Senior Circuit. Or Cycling for the elderly. You will never be too old to exercise!

5. Start the exercise calmly. Certainly a little quieter than you even think you have to. But at the same time exercise hard enough to make you sweaty. Once you’ve trained so you need to shower afterward, you know you’ve worked hard enough.

You do not need to find out about all the forms of training in the world. In recent years, I have been training in fitness centers on average from three to five days a week, almost just two or three types of exercise.

My favorite types of training at the three-way studio are cycling (60 min, 90–95% max pulse), yoga (Yoga Flow, Yin Yoga, Yoga Release), and training of arm muscles on the apparatus. Had I been at work during the day, I would have tried to get at least three workouts a week. And preferably an hour’s walk out the weekend.

Get started today! Good luck!

Photo by Chander R on Unsplash